This past weekend I had a great opportunity to use my new Agloves in the field, as I was speaking at SQL Saturday #59 in New York City. I love visiting New York, but it always seems that we visit during a cold spell. The first time Rob and I visited together the wind chill was about –15 and the cold wind tunnel effect of all those tall buildings made it feel as if the weather was going to suck the life right out of us.

What I remember most about our previous trips to New York is trying to take photos in that bone chilling weather, but having to:

remove my gloves

swap my gloves for my phone in my purse

wait for my phone to start up

enter my phone password

open the camera app

wait for the camera to focus

help the camera focus and choose the right lighting by clicking on the screen

click on the screen button to take the picture

…and trying to do all that with creeping numbness in my fingers which just made all that take longer.

While it wasn’t quite that cold in NYC for this trip (it was around 38-40 degrees at the coldest), it was still chilly enough that I was happy to have my Agloves and to be able to use my iPhone and iPad without ever having to remove my gloves.

You can see from the pictures above that while we were visiting Rockefeller Center I could take my time to compose a photo. The lighting was tricky there because it was cloudy and the statue of Prometheus was behind scaffolding, so I had to keep setting the lighting and focus properly. Being able to keep my gloves on also meant that I was able to take many more photos than I did the last time.

As the day went on, we walked to most of the regular tourist stops in Manhattan. It was starting to get dark and much cooler by the time we got to Macy’s in Herald Square. More tricky lighting in that the Macy’s windows displays had projection, glass reflections, dimmed lighting and animation.

Here I’m taking a photo of one of vignettes of the “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” story. Again, I had time to work on the composition, lighting and focus.

One of the other benefits that I hadn’t considered when I first purchased these gloves was that I didn’t have to know if the device I was using used the type of technology that required a capacitive touch technology to work. Not all touch screens require this, so regular gloves could work…or they might not…. But I didn’t have to know, I could could keep my gloves on either way.

I didn’t realize how many touch screen devices that weren’t mine I used on a typical trip, but here are some of them:

An ATM machine

A vending machine

A vending machine in the subway.

I’m betting that most of these last devices, including the ones in the taxis, were not capacitive. I loved the fact, though, that I didn’t have to know either way; I could leave my gloves on and interact with all these machines without getting cold. I have to admit, too, that my inner germaphobe loved that I wasn’t using my bare hands to touch these screens. This was a special bonus.

I’ll be posting some of the pictures we took in New York while we were there so that you can see the results of our having time to compose better photos.

I also checked, just for fun, and the gloves do work on the Xbox 360 controls (on button, DVD eject button) which won’t work with regular gloves. Not sure if I’m ever going to wear them while playing, but I just had to know.

Finally, while the temperature did not dip down below freezing, I found the Agloves to be warm, unlike acrylic gloves, and breathable. They aren’t overly thick, so I was able to tweet and send mail during our walk through NYC, all while keeping warm.

Overall I’d say our field test was a success.

From previous tweets, it sounds like Agloves is going to run a Black Friday special of some sort. You can follow them or search for their Twitter ID to find out what specials they have in mind.